Read and Learn More About Pests

You’ve opened the curtains to take a look outside and you notice small light-colored dots appearing on an area of a window or window screen. Actually, they look like patches of tiny little eggs, hundreds of them. Come to think of it, perhaps you’ve seen these before.

Well, it’s most likely that a moth has selected your window to lay her eggs. The tiny egg masses turn yellowish and then brownish before the moth larvae hatch. Annoying, yes, but could is this turn into a bigger problem?

Let’s Talk Moths

There are many species of moth. Indeed, there are approximately 11,000 moth species in the United States alone (greater than all bird and mammal species in North America combined). Like their close relatives the butterfly, many can be quite beautiful and great pollinators.

However, there are several types of moths that fall into the category of pests due to the harm and damage they can do to our homes. The infamous clothes moths, or webbing clothes moths, are known for moth damage as they love to munch on wool, hair, leather, synthetic fiber, cotton, linen, silk, and especially cashmere clothing! However, it’s not the adult clothes moths that cause destruction to the fabrics but rather the larvae that feed on pretty much anything they can get their mouths onto.

These can be a persistent issue so you need to take a professional and thorough approach to keep the clothes moths away. Only by destroying the eggs and disrupting its life cycle that the problem can be solved in the long-term. Clothes moths tend to like indoor dark, warm corners to lay their eggs so these aren’t the ones laying eggs on the outside windows of your home.

The Indian meal moths are another type of moth that loves our homes. They are also commonly called pantry moths because they love to feed on flour, grains, cereals, and pet food as well as herbs or dried fruit. That’s where Indian meal moths lay their eggs and the larvae get busy, eating through paper and cardboard boxes to get to those pantry goodies.

The site of these small grey moths fluttering around in your cupboard or seeing the small caterpillars wriggling about in your bag of flour can be quite alarming and disgusting. Again, they are a significant problem if you have an infestation problem and will need to take some serious initiative in ridding yourself of this type of pest.

Pantry moths are also not likely to lay their eggs on windows. There are also several types of moth that are destructive to your garden and yard. They would include armyworms, or cutworms, whose caterpillars love to feed during the night on turf grass, plants, flowers, leaves of crops and just about anything green it can find.

Adult moths appear brown or black with stripes/blotches. Gypsy moths are also a problem for the damage they do during the caterpillar stage, as they love almost any type of tree including oak, hemlock, beech, birch, willow, and apple. Gypsy moths eat tree leaves leaving them susceptible to disease and parasites which can hinder tree growth or ultimately death.

If you have a lot of moth activity in the yard during mid to late summer, it can indicate that there may be some cutworms, gypsy moths or even armyworms in your yard. These are the emerging adults that have successfully completed their life cycle.

This means they were recently larvae (caterpillars) in the immediate area and would have been feeding on the local vegetation. If you notice evidence of damage to your grass, trees, and garden then you will need to take a dedicated approach to eliminating them before they become a serious infestation.

Why Are They Laying Eggs On My Windows?

Actually, it’s not uncommon to have moths lay their eggs on windows or window screens. Indeed, there is a reason why they may have selected your home and windows to lay their eggs. To better understand, here are a few important factors.

Drawn To The Light

We all know that most nocturnal insects are attracted by light. Female moths can be drawn to lay their eggs near a light source, usually in the evening when the lights are on indoors. By drawing the curtains and reducing the visibility of indoor light, you may be able to also reduce the chance of a moth selecting your particular window.

It’s That Time Of Year Again

Moths tend to lay their eggs towards the end of summer and early fall. You may notice that’s when you may start to get the little patches of eggs on windows, screen doors and other places around the home (outer walls, siding). They do favor buildings and other man-made structures for laying their eggs.

Love is in the Air

We mentioned the influence of light in attracting moths to the home. A female moth is drawn to the light and active around your windows (banging upon them, or laying her eggs) can leave her scent for a long time, even after she is gone.

The female moth scent is very strong and signals male moths from miles away to come looking for love. Where there was one, there may soon be many moths waiting for extended times for the chance to mate. The outdoor lighting around homes, as well as protected areas from wind and rain, will encourage moths to stick around.

Bigger populations of moths will eventually result in mating and laying of eggs on areas of the building. With the vegetation from a front or back yard (grass, trees, and garden), there is plenty of food supply for the larvae to feed and establish themselves.This may result in extended damage to the vegetation if left untreated.

Removing Moth Eggs From Windows

As soon as you’ve noticed the moth eggs, it’s recommended that you remove them before they hatch into larvae. Again, the larvae stage is the destructive part of the moth lifecycle when they have a feeding frenzy and can damage your vegetation. If it’s a screen, remove it and with a mixture of soap and water, scrub it off and rinse well (a toothbrush or bristle brush will be fine).

On a flat surface such as glass or siding, you can scrap it off and scrub the surface with hot water and soap or window cleaner. The more thorough the cleaning of the general surface will also help to remove the female moth scent and prevent further attraction of male moles to the area.

Summing Up

If you suspect you have a moth problem, it will likely take a dedicated effort to ensure an infestation won’t persist or re-occur each year. To reduce the overall damage to your home, a professional with the know-how, right equipment and treatments (safe and tested), and guarantee of long-lasting results, can be the best way to give you peace of mind.

Our pest control partners have tried and true solutions to eliminate the nuisance and damage moths can have on your home, inside and out. Being a professional means recommending a plan that is right for your home and your budget. It is easy to book the first-visit by calling or booking online so that a pest control specialist can assess how to best eliminate any moth problems or potential damage.

Managed DNS Services

6 Cool Hidden Easter Eggs in Windows 7

Since Easter is right around the corner, check out 6 cool Easter eggs for Windows 7… Happy Easter!

1. God Mode
This hidden egg will conveniently put hundreds of settings from all over the os into one place.
How?

Create a new folder on your desktop and name it GodMode.
270 items will automatically be added to the folder consisting of every configurable option in Windows 7.

2. The calculator on windows is as old as time. Not much cool stuff to do with calculators except the cool formulas that we used to do as kids that spelled out funny and bad words when you turned the calculator upside down. Anyways, the Windows 8 calculator actually has a few extra useful tools like unit conversions, (weight, temperature, area etc) and cool worksheets to help you calculate a car’s fuel mileage or a mortgage payment.

3. Having Issues with your computer? Use the Reliability Monitor
The Reliability Monitor allows you to see a graph of your system’s “stability index” over a period of days, weeks, months, and up to even a year. It is then rated on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 is not reliable at all and 10 being super reliable, and shows you the specific programs that are causing issues or crashing over a specific period of time.
How? Search for “reliability” in the Start Menu Search and run View Reliability History

4. Need help with something on your computer, like port forwarding, IP camera settings, etc, but remote access tech support isn’t an option? Use the Problem Steps Recorder.
The Problem Steps Recorder will record your computer activities through a series screenshots. The program also automatically adds captions to the screenshots to show exactly where you clicked. You can also add custom comments by clicking the Add Comment button. When you have finished recording, the program will automatically join all of the images together and save the file, conveniently zipped as an MTHML file.

How? Search for “psr” in the Start Menu Search and run the program. Click Start Record and viola!

5. Power Management
My Windows Laptop battery isn’t the greatest, and it usually drives me nuts. I recently found a cool way to diagnose the battery issue and it works like a charm. Power Efficiency Report will quickly report what programs or errors are causing your computer’s battery to drain quickly.

How? Search for “CMD” in the Start Menu Search. Run it as an admin – right click cmd.exe on the search menu and choose Run as administrator.
From the command prompt type

When it is finished you will be presented with a file called energy-report.html in your windowssystems32 folder. Drag the report to your desktop or some other place (it won’t open in the systems32 folder) double click to open and view what may be causing problems in your power management.

6. Pin your favorite folders and programs to the Taskbar.
How? Right click any folder, or program – drag to an empty space on your Taskbar and drop it when “Pin to Windows Explorer appears. Now, when you right-click on the Windows Explorer button your folders will be easily accessible.

Know any other hidden eggs? Leave them in the comments! Also, be sure to Share, Tweet, Like, Tumblr and all that

How can I install a .egg Python package on Windows (attempt using easy_install not working)

I am trying to install a package named QSTK for a course that I am doing. The course points to an installation package for the 32 bit version, but I have 64 Python installed. I have found a .egg file listed on the Python packages index.

It seems to have an exe for 32 bit, but just the .egg for 64 bit. I downloaded the QSTK-0.2.6-py2.7.egg version and have been trying to install this unsucessfully so far.

Here is what I have tried:

Using easy install (from the C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages directory):

this has created a QSTK-0.2.6-py2.7.egg directory in my site-packages directory which I can open and find files in. However, I have tried to import QSTK from the python shell and get the usual «No module named. » import error.

I looked for a setup.py file as I have used these to install packages before, but could not find one.

I have also looked at this thread which gives details of installing a .egg file without using easy install, but cannot figure out what changes I would need to make to the script provided as this is to install a specific package that I already have.

If anyone can help by explaining either how I can install this .egg file correctly or by providing a link to the QSTK modules for python 2.7 64 bit in another format this would be greatly appreciated.

I have managed to install the packages that QSTK is dependant on okay (numpy, scipy, matplotlib, pandas, python-dateutil and scikit-learn).

Windows 95 Easter egg discovered after being hidden for 25 years

Lawrence Abrams

A Windows hacker has found a never-before-seen Easter egg in the Windows 95 Internet Mail application, twenty-five years after the software was released.

When developing software, it is not uncommon for developers to slip in a secret hidden feature, message, or even a mini-game, that users can discover by performing particular actions in a program.

Easter eggs are always fun to find as they provide a small glimpse into a relaxed moment in the normally hectic and serious pace of software development.

This week, a new Easter egg in Windows 95’s Internet Mail program has been discovered by Windows hacker and developer Albacore, opening a secret window that displays a scrolling list of the developer’s names.

Before this discovery, there is no known mention of this Easter egg, meaning it has remained undiscovered for close to 25 years.

«It’s never too late to find easter eggs. Happened to notice what looks like a never before seen easter egg in Windows 95’s / IE4’s Internet Mail. You have to open its About window, select one of the files, and type MORTIMER. Names of the program’s developers will start scrolling,» Albacore tweeted yesterday.

To access the Easter egg, users need to launch Internet Mail, click on Help, and then About. When the About screen opens, click on the listed comctl32.dll file, so it becomes highlighted, and then type MORTIMER on your keyboard.

After typing ‘mortimer,’ a small window will be displayed that will begin to list the Internet Mail developer’s names, as shown in the video above that was shared with BleepingComputer.

Windows 95 Team and NT4 Team Easter eggs

In addition to the Easter egg found in Internet Mail, Albacore also shared a video of a previously known Windows 95’s Product Team Easter egg that lists all of the operating system’s developers.

Albacore told BleepingComputer that the final version of this Easter egg could be launched by creating a folder named «and now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for», then renaming it to «we proudly present for your viewing pleasure», and finally renaming it to «The Microsoft Windows 95 Product Team!»

To make it easier to launch the Easter egg, Albacore patched shell32.dll so that it could be launched by opening a folder named ‘Clouds,’ as demonstrated in the video below.

If you played video games in the days of Windows 95, watching this video will immediately bring back a sense of nostalgia as you listen to the MIDI music playing in the background.

Albacore also shared video of the Windows NT 4.0 team’s Easter egg that was found in beta builds of NT 4.

Windows NT 4.0 betas contain their own variant of the Windows 95 Product Team easter egg. The revision found in builds 1130-1175 includes short but real credits which mention people like @davepl1968 — who these days runs the excellent Dave’s Garage YouTube channel. pic.twitter.com/3OVeMeeFlT

Update 3/27/21: Added further info about the Windows 95 Team Easter egg. Added NT 4.0 Easter egg.